Gallery 01:18

Faces and Emotions What is it that makes us recognise someone? Capturing a characteristic feature – such as a snub nose or a glance from under a fringe – does not necessarily convey an exact likeness. Rather, it gives an impression that immediately reveals who the person is. In a drawing, the memory of the person portrayed is preserved, along with the emotions shared between the artist and their model. When artists draw themselves, the situation is often more exploratory. They look at us from the paper with questioning eyes, and the gaze we meet is the one they have turned on themselves. In this day and age, we look at our own faces more than ever before, and images of ourselves have become a common part of shaping our identity. But while documenting ourselves with a mobile phone only takes a moment, the drawn self-portrait involves more introspection, looking beyond the surface, into ourselves. Here we see images of people, portraits and self-portraits, all charged with different emotions. One drawing depicts a child with dark eye sockets in a morgue, another a newborn baby with round cheeks. Lena Cronqvist has drawn a stone between two people in a bed; dark and heavy, it lies there, making sleep impossible. In Afrang Nordlöf Malekian’s work, My Dear Dad Said, we witness a drawing in progress. The soft bristles of the brush caress the artist’s skin, while the darkness of the story leaves traces of emotion as black as the brushstrokes on the body.